Men on a mission

As a gay man with expensive taste who has finally been granted some of the golden keys of heteronormativity, I'm ashamed that it has taken me this long to be able to say it, but as of yesterday at 4pm, M. and I are finally registered.

At one place, anyways.

And even then, only partially, because what started out as an afternoon of giddy gift-choosing excitement with two fresh-faced young grooms-to-be quickly turned into a spectacle of chaos and gluttony by two weary- and bleary-eyed zombies plagued by broken scanner-guns and missing SKUs and vacant salesmen.

Registering for wedding gifts is a little bit like those shows where they would give the ten-year old kid 5 minutes to fill his shopping cart in the toy store, and he would always spend the first four minutes searching for the big-ticket items like the dirt bikes and the computers, but once things got down to the wire, he would just start frantically tossing anything he could find into the cart, like sixty hula hoops or a five-foot stuffed pink dog.

After we'd tagged and bagged the Kitchen-Aid mixer and the Le Creuset casserole, it became less about what we really needed and more about what we thought we should need, or even could need, or what might possibly fill the bottomless and empty soul of our kitchen. Thankfully, after standing in front of the knife collection with Vacant Salesman Number Three for ten minutes, unable to decide on just how many different lengths of paring and carving and cleaving knives we actually might need, it dawned on us that we don't even know how to pare or carve or cleave, so we decided to just settle on the basics.

Like a santoku knife. And an asparagus collander. And a silicone spoonula.